Bob Cratchit is the name of Ebenezer Scrooge's supposedly "underpaid" clerk in his now famous story A Christmas Carol. However a small look at the facts reveals that Cratchit himself is a toady little whinger.
Bob Cratchit is paid the "misery" sum of "fifteen bob a week". Whilst that sounds to be not very much and also incidentally is the current price of the Sydney Morning Herald (yes it's $1.50), there is the small matter of inflation to attend to.
Fifteen Bob a week works out to be $78 per year, but that was back in 1834. Even if you adopt a poor measure of inflation at only 4%, that produces a multiple of 1034.9063. If you multiply that by $78, then you get $80,722 which is a pretty good sort of wage to be on. If you take the average rate of inflation at 5% then Mr Cratchit is paid a staggering $439,137 per year.
In short we don't need to feel sorry for Bob Cratchit. In fact we should be feeling sorry for Ebenezer Scrooge who not only has to pay an exorbitant wage to this guttersnipe but he also shoulders all of the business risk as well since his business partner Marley died.
To put this in perspective Friedrich Engels who would later with Karl Marx write the Communist Manifesto wrote in his 1844 book "The Condition of the Working-Class in England" that the average wage in 1844 was only 10/6 a week which is still 4/6 a week less than Bob Cratchit was paid ten years earlier.
Admittedly until at least the late 19th century, Cratchit's home of Camden Town was considered an "unfashionable" locality but even then its close proximity to the then biggest trading centre in the world was incredibly useful. Even today the average price for a 1 bedroom flat within its NW1 postcode is well above the £300,000 mark.
And we're expected to feel sorry for him?.. not likely.
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